With the proliferation of the Internet, businesses are now taking advantage of using text-chat as an alternative to the telephone or email as a form of communication between the customer and the business representative in an effort to improve customer service. A customer may prefer text-chatting over a call-in telephone number to keep the customer's phone line free or to save mobile minutes that a customer pays each time the customer uses the customer's cell phone. Moreover, a customer may be more comfortable text-chatting, (e.g., if the customer was already online) and thus would request assistance that the customer otherwise would not. Likewise, customers may have a need for immediate assistance, and choose to chat rather than send an email that may be answered in a number of hours/days. Text-chat also allows a customer to communicate in their channel of choice—the internet channel.
However, text-chatting faces many of the same issues that are present when communication is performed via a telephone between a customer and a service representative. In a financial service context, traditionally a customer may be asked to provide identification information repeatedly in the duration of one service phone call. For example, before even speaking with a service representative, the customer may be asked by an automated telephone system (e.g., Interactive Voice Response or IVR) to identify the customer including, but not limited to the customer's name, account number, and/or password. After transferring the customer to the service representative, the customer may again be asked for the same or different identification information. A customer using text-chat to communicate with a service representative may face similar redundancy. Such repeated security protocols are tedious, time-consuming, but necessary to ensure security—especially considering the potential consequences should access to the customer's account be granted inappropriately.
With respect to the financial institution providing the customer service, any time spent by an agent in authenticating or confirming the identity of the customer only detracts from the time the customer service representative or agent could be spending to assist this or another customer, thus increasing costs and decreasing efficiency. Additionally, from a financial institution's perspective, not all customers are alike. For example, some customers may be entitled to specific service levels, while other customers may be entitled to other service levels. Such a distinction may be based upon the level of assistance that the customer is likely to need (e.g., newly acquired customers as a result of a merger is likely to require more assistance than an already existing customer). As such, blindly allowing all customers to be able to text-chat is not optimal and may further contribute to increasing costs and decreasing efficiency.